Data is not information. Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not life.

Sunday, March 16, 2014

MH370 - a North Korean scenario

Okay, this post is a little tongue in cheek, and may get out
of date very quickly – the story about Malaysian flight 370 going missing is
still developing, and new information could appear at any time. And of course,
especially since I know various people who work in airlines, I have every
sympathy with passengers and crew and their families, and hope the truth comes
quickly to light.

But as well as the human story, there's the events
themselves, which have captured my attention along with that of many other
people. What has taken place looks like quite a feat of planning. So I thought I'd chip in with my thoughts.

When the news about the disappearance of MH370 first broke
around the eighth of March, a few people pretty quickly mentioned "North
Korea" – after all, it's in Asia, it was about to declare election
results, and its policy decisions are pretty unconventional. Maybe it had shot
the airliner down, or something.

But if you look at a map, you see that North Korea is a long way from the area where the
Boeing 777 went missing. So people set that thought aside fairly quickly, and
the focus was on the aeroplane being lost close to where it went missing.

In the last couple of days, though, new information says that
the aeroplane continued to remain powered for up to seven hours. That changes
a lot – in that time, not counting the effects of any wind, the aircraft could
travel another 2500 miles or so. That's a big search area – so big that the
only way we might ever know what happened is if we have a story to start with.
And if it's the case that the aeroplane was taken off route on purpose, then
someone somewhere definitely has a story.

So here's what may have happened.

One hour out of Kuala Lumpur, the transponder is switched
off, along with all communication systems. The aeroplane is basically invisible
to the civil radar system, and not talking to anyone. The aeroplane continues
towards Beijing, but not talking to the outside world. The passengers are
unaware that anything untoward is happening. As it gets within an hour or so
from the destination, the pilots announce to the passengers and crew that the
aeroplane is diverting – perhaps to Jinzhou airport to the east. The cabin crew
prepare the aeroplane for landing, but just twenty minutes before landing, off
the Chinese coast, the pilots turn further east, and make for an airport in
North Korea, landing there around the time they were expecting to land from the
diversion. With careful management of the aeroplane, the first the cabin crew
or passengers know about where they are is after the aeroplane is shut down.
And if there's no mobile phone signal, then nobody can get a message away.

What evidence does
this deal with?

No wreckage has been discovered where the aeroplane went out
of contact, and it would have taken pretty much five more hours for the
aeroplane to fly to North Korea, land and power down. It also explains why THIS
flight was taken, as it can continue towards North Korea without the passengers being
aware of it until too late. If the passengers were alive and knew that the
aeroplane was going in a completely different direction, I think they'd have
made attempts to use mobile phones or other communication devices – almost
certainly someone would have managed something. The passengers' mobile phones
were reported in some cases continued to ring – this might be because the
passengers made it alive and well to North Korea, but then had the phones taken
away from them or something.

The map below shows great circle tracks from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and Pyongyang.

What are the problems
with the theory?

Well, to be honest, this is a pretty unlikely theory.

First, the radar return heading west across the Malay
peninsula, which has resulted in the search attention being redirected to that
area. There are various possibilities. One is that it was a deliberate decoy –
in the same way that the aeroplane went incommunicado at a particular point to
focus attention on that, a radar trace in the wrong direction which
subsequently came to light would also provide a distraction and keep people
looking in the wrong direction.

Second is, although the transponder, radio systems and
presumably things like Collision avoidance systems, were switched off, is it
really possible for an airliner to fly for thousands of miles without being
detected? The transponder provides an active system, which air traffic control
systems use – but aeroplanes also produce a passive reflection for radar – the
system that was used before transponders were – and a Boeing 777 would produce
a pretty big echo. If you look at the route from Kuala Lumpur to North Korea,
it would take the aeroplane close to Hong Kong and Shanghai, pretty busy
airspace. I showed the position of these airports on the map above. Could it really have avoided being detected all through this
airspace?

Third, wouldn't someone have seen it? As far as people on
the ground are concerned, how much notice do you take of an airliner at
cruising altitude. When was the last one you saw? I suppose if it's somewhere
that you never see one, then you might notice – but otherwise, you probably
wouldn't consider it to be a significant event. What about other aeroplanes
noticing? That's harder. If the aeroplane was invisible and its presence not
known, with a lot of the systems switched off, then the pilots would have had
to sort out their own means of avoiding other aeroplanes – there's a lot of space,
but aeroplanes tend to be funnelled down narrow corridors called airways.
Having said that, aeroplanes pass each other like ships in the night, and the
pilots will just assume that they are being looked after by air traffic
control. The easiest way of not being noticed is probably to look as though
you're supposed to be there.

But finally, WHY? There's half an opportunity, but what
could be the motive? It's possible to imagine that one or both of the pilots
might have been bribed, and the North Korean government is notoriously
unpredictable. But what would the government actually do with an airliner full
of passengers if it arrived there?

There are all sorts of technical problems with this as a
story, and it raises loads of questions. But at the moment, we don't have any
stories at all. With this story, at least we have some parts of the
"how", even if we don't have a "why".